It's sad to witness how much suffering developers are ready to endure (and make their users suffer) just not to part ways with HTML/CSS/JS stack. The stack that was never designed properly, let alone for modern UI apps.
Flutter would be much better choice for such a desktop app, for example.
On the other hand, they shipped, proved the product, and got their first paying customers with a web stack. And the top HN comment thread is people talking about the downsides of Tauri cross-platform.
It's all trade-offs, unfortunately.
you still can't have multiple windows with flutter, which disqualifies it for building desktop apps.
True. But this is actively being worked on by Canonical: https://ubuntu.com/blog/multiple-window-flutter-desktop
How exactly is it a problem for the typical desktop app?
There is an unfortunate increasing trend to build desktop apps that only live in one window, so it's not really a "disqualification" - perhaps more a "complication".
wxWidgets or QtWidgets if you want a proper desktop GUI app.
My problem with wxWidgets was I kinda wish its API was more elegant
There were also some subtle issues like the child windows leaking a lot of memory in the GTK implementations when idle (something like spamming gobjects).
I wouldn't touch Qt even with a ten foot pole, too much bloated for me.
Heck, Tcl/Tk could work as well.
that's funny, most of the time I don't even want to USE apps written in those because they're dated and janky as hell, must less write in them
How so?